The Problem With God

[disinfo ed.’s note: the following is an excerpt from the forthcoming book The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates by Howard Bloom (“I have met God and he lives in Brooklyn” – Richard Metzger), courtesy of the author and Prometheus Books.]

Imagine this. You are a twelve-year-old in a godforsaken steel town that once helped suture the Great Lakes to the Atlantic coast of North America and Europe. A city that, for you, is a desert—a wasteland without other minds that welcome you. Buffalo, New York.

Your bar mitzvah is coming up. (Congratulations—you are Jewish for a day.) And you are avoiding a huge confession. One that will utterly change your life. A confession about one of the biggest superstars of human history. God.

You are not a popular kid. In fact, other kids either ignore you or try with all their might to keep you from getting anywhere near their backyard play sessions, their baseball diamonds, their clubs, and their parties. When they do pay attention to you, it’s to take aim. They kick soccer balls in your face. They grab your hat and play toss with it over your head while you run back and forth trying to yank it out of the heights above your reach. Or they pry your textbooks from your arms and throw them on a lawn covered with dog droppings.

No one your age wants you in Buffalo, New York.

But at the age of ten you discover a clique that does welcome you. Why? It’s a clique of dead men. And dead men have no choice. The two heroes you glue yourself to, two heroes not in a position to object if you tag along and join them in their games, are Galileo and Anton van Leeuwenhoek. These are men who shuffled off this mortal coil roughly three hundred years ago. But they put you on a quest, a mission, an adventure that will last you a lifetime.

Your task? To pursue the truth at any price, including the price of your life. To find things right under your nose, things that you, your parents, and all the kids who shun you take for granted. To look at these everyday things as if you’ve never seen them before. To look for hidden assumptions and to overturn them. To look for really big questions then to zero in on them. Even if the answers will not arrive in your lifetime.

Why do this? Because your dead companions have lured you into science. And the first two rules of science are:

1. The truth at any price including the price of your life.

2. Look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them
before, then proceed from there.

What’s more, in science the next big question can be more important than the next big answer. New questions can produce new scientific leaps. They can tiddlywink new flips of insight and understanding. Big ones. Paradigm shifts.
New questions can even show the people who’ve rejected you how to think in whole new ways. And that is your mission. Finding the questions that will produce the next big perception shift. Finding the unseen vantage points that will allow others to radically reperceive.

So how does God get into the picture? Remember, you are twelve. Your bar mitzvah is coming up. Your dad is going to throw a party for all the kids you know—for all the kids who humiliate you at Public School 64. And this time you are invited. Yes, your bar mitzvah is the very first time that you will be allowed to attend a celebration with your peers. And it gets better. The center of attention will be, guess who? You.

But something is rumbling through your mind. Something you refuse to register. Something that could cancel your bar mitzvah. You’ve read the arguments that Bertrand Russell has made about God. These arguments hit home with you. God, in Russell’s opinion, is a silly idea. If it took a God to create a universe, then a thing as complex and as powerful as a God would need a creator, too. And who or what created God?5

In other words, the notion of a God doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t appeal to your emotions, either. So the confession that you are dodging is this: You are about to become a stone-cold atheist. But if you admit that to yourself right now, you will blow your bar mitzvah.

The result? The question of whether there is a God stays safely hidden in your subconscious. You never put it in words, even to yourself. But that’s just the beginning.

The party happens—a bowling party. It isn’t what you expected. The other kids show up. But they do what they’ve always done. They ignore you. You are left out even at your own shindig. Thank God the dead guys of science still welcome you. But the heap of presents is extraordinary.

Then it’s confession time. There is no God. You are as certain of that as you are that a bus slamming into you and your bicycle at thirty miles per hour at the corner of Colvin Avenue and Amherst Street could do you serious damage. And if there were a deity hanging around in the skies, what kind of God could he be? A monster, a pervert, and a serial killer? A demented and addicted murderer of plants, animals, and entire species? A torturer and slayer of creatures made in his own image, a mass murderer of human beings?

You’ve read the Bible from cover to cover, and one story in particular bothers you. The story of Job. Job is a good man, a man whom God has made successful and rich. And a man who believes profoundly in his maker. But God is sitting around heaven one Saturday afternoon with the Accuser— God’s chief prosecutor: a combination of security chief, head of Earth’s domestic spy agency,6 and district attorney.7 There is no Super Bowl and no TV. So what do two very macho guys, two guys on a power trip, do when they are forced to amuse themselves? They compete over who can do the best job of guessing the future. They make bets. (Why we humans and the gods that we imagine get a kick out of testing our prediction powers—and competing over them—is a subject for another time.)

Here’s how your twelve-year-old mind recalls the tale. The Accuser bets God that humans only believe in the Deity-in-Chief so long as he delivers the goods. God, the divine attorney implies, suckers humans into belief by paying them off, by putting them on the payroll. Cancel the flow of bribes, says the quibbling public prosecutor of the heavens, make life miserable enough for the greatest believer, and even the most pious human will turn on God and curse his very name. You’re on, says God. I’ll take that bet.

To prove his point, God puts Job in the crosshairs of a demonstration project. Wealth, in these biblical times, is based on the number of four-legged animals you own. And because God has been generous to Job, his flocks of animals are abundant—seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, a thousand oxen, and five hundred “she-asses” to be precise.8 So God kills the sheep, the camels, the oxen, and the asses. He wipes out Job’s savings.9 He turns Job from a rich man to a poor man overnight.

Does this make Job turn on God? Not a bit. Strip Job of his fortune and he still swears his belief in his creator. So God takes the demonstration a step further. God has been good to Job in the fertility department, and Job and his wife have ten kids—three daughters and a whopping seven sons. So God kills the children. All ten of them. Does Job curse God? Not one bit. He hangs on tight to his belief.

God takes things even further. He takes aim at the one thing Job has left, his body. He turns Job’s very skin into a torture chamber. He gives Job boils whose pains produce an infinite hell minute by minute and second by second. Job sits in a pile of ashes and covers himself with them, trying to stop the agony. But does Job say screw you to the big guy in the sky? Does he curse God? Not one bit. He prays to God, he begs for God’s aid, and he sticks to God through thick and thin.

The bet is over. God wins. Then God, who is praised for his compassion but should be condemned for his mean streak, gives Job ten new children and a slew of new sheep.

In other words, God is a mass murderer. He has no compunctions about killing Job’s children. And he acts as if a new family will make amends for the kids whose lives he has snuffed. Why does God kill so casually? In this case, just to win a bet. What’s worse, God makes mass murder ordinary. He makes massacre an everyday reality. How? When you and I were born, only one thing was certain about the rest of our lives: that you and I would someday die. Just as billions of humans and over a trillion, trillion, trillion (1036) microorganisms, animals, and plants have died before us. Yes, God kills creatures by the trillions of trillions of trillions. In fact, trillions of tril- lions of trillions is an undercount.

A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is, he is a God who has to be opposed. He is a God whose cruelty cannot be allowed to continue. He is a God who must be stopped.

Or, to put it in the words of the mid-twentieth-century American poet Archibald MacLeish, “If God is God, he is not good. If God is good, he is not God.”10 If God is all powerful, if God is omnipotent, then his brutality is outrageous. And if God is not the creator and the controller of violence, then God is not omnipotent. He is not all powerful. He is not God.

Your bar mitzvah takes place on your birthday, so you are now a grown- up thirteen. And you’ve finally confessed your atheism. But you see the dilemma of deity—the problem of Job, the problem of good and evil—in terms of another biblical story, the tale of Jacob. Jacob wants to climb to the heavens and palaver with God, to negotiate with him face to face. God plays this scene as if he were Al Pacino in The Godfather. He has a thug, an angel, guarding the ladder to heaven. You imagine this as a ladder about eight feet high leading to a heaven that hovers over the earth at roughly the height of a low-hanging tree house. When Jacob reaches the foot of the tree house ladder, the holy bouncer refuses to let him touch even the first rung. Jacob objects. Strenuously. The two—Jacob and the angel—get into a nasty fight, wrestling their biceps off. Jacob loses.

As you see it, it’s your job to do what Jacob failed to accomplish. It’s your job to toss the bouncer aside as if he were a crumpled candy wrapper. It’s your job to climb that ladder, to barge into God’s living room, to grab the little sucker by the collar of his robe, and to tell him that either he shape up or we humans will have to take over. Why? Because it’s your job to do some- thing we still have not learned how to do—to stop the massacre, to stop the new Holocausts and the new Rwanda’s. To stop death in its tracks. To stop the vicious little bastard we call God.

The first rule of science is the truth at any price including the price of your life. That rule also applies to morality. You have to stop torture, pain, and death even if doing so endangers you. Which means if mass murder is taking place, you and I have to stop it. Even if we risk losing our lives.

But the nonexistence of god and the cruelty of the cosmos is not the really big revelation. It is not the insight that leads you to a massive challenge for science—and to a massive challenge for you and me. The crucial bolt of lightning that hits you is this. You are still thirteen. A mere ten weeks after your bar mitzvah and your confession of atheism, the Jewish High Holidays arrive. Your parents believe in God so deeply that they literally try to outdo God’s bouncer—they wrestle you into a car to take you to Temple Beth El on Richmond Avenue. Why? Because High Holiday services are the most important services in the Jewish year. But when it’s time to leave the car, you refuse. So your mom and dad literally grab you by the ankles and try to drag you from their blue, four-door Frazer while you hold on to the rear right doorframe for all you’re worth. Or at least that’s the way you remember it.

What’s more, by then you’ve been in science for a whopping 23 percent of your life. Since the age of ten. So you’ve read a considerable amount of anthropology. And every tribe you’ve ever read about agrees with your parents. Every tribe believes that there is some sort of god, some sort of supernatural power. Yes, the gods of each of these strange clans scattered across the face of the earth and sprinkled through history have been dif- ferent—gods who create, gods who keep things running, gods who destroy, gods with faces on the fronts and backs of their heads, gods with a third eye, gods who hold lightning bolts in their hands, gods who hold fistfuls of snakes, dog goddesses, gods of civilization, gods of music, Earth goddesses, gods and goddesses of death, goddesses of light, monkey gods, emperor gods, gods of jade, gods who handle heaven’s paperwork, gods who file reports on your behavior, gods with elephant trunks, goddesses with eight arms, gods with the heads of jackals, goddesses with the heads of cats, and gods with the heads of hawks. Nearly every tribe and nearly every human being has gods. Belief in gods is all over the place. It’s universal. It squeaks and squoozes from every pore of humanity.

So if there are no gods in the sky, on the mountaintops, or in rivers, rocks, and underworlds, where are they? The second rule of science tells you to look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then to proceed from there. The most obvious thing right under your nose turns out not to be under your nose at all. It turns out to be behind your nose. The gods are in our imaginations. The gods are in our emotions and in our passions. The gods are in our hearts and minds.

But take God out of the skies, put him in the minds, guts, and gonads of human beings, and you’re left with a massive question. How does a Godless cosmos pull off the tricks that every genesis myth tries to grasp? Back to your café table in the nothing before the birth of the universe. If you believe the big bang theory—and the story of what the big bang theory means for you and me is about to come—then once upon a time there was a nothing. From that no thing came the first some thing, the big bang. And it wasn’t just any something. It wasn’t just an undifferentiated mass like a black hole. It was a speed rush of time and space that had within it the seeds of an entire universe. The seeds of atoms, suns, planets, and galactic superclusters. The seeds of algae, cabbages, flamingos, termites, and trees. The seeds of you and me.

That’s a colossal act of creativity, a stupendous act of genesis and inven- tion. How did it happen? Why did it happen? If there is no creator, no engineer, no omniscient and omnipotent consciousness presiding over the start of everything, no sleazy little bastard in the sky making bets with his buddy the public prosecutor, then how did this rush of time and space come to be? How did the universe create something so unlikely, something so surprising, something that broke every previous rule? Something that made brand new rules of its own? How did the cosmos create time and space? And why?

But there’s more. In the first 10-12 seconds of this cosmos’s existence, as you and I saw from our café table at the beginning of the universe, the space-time sheet popped forth the very first things—quarks. Then it show- ered protons and neutrons. But that was just the opening act. The cosmos shaped the flickers and flits of photons and electrons. It crafted the lumpy nanoballs called atoms, the giant sweepings of dust and gas called galaxies, the massive clench and screaming crunch of stars. The cosmos birthed giant ropes of molecules able to seduce each other into dances beyond the dreams of human choreographers into the most peculiar molecule dance of them all, life.

How in the world did the cosmos pull this off ?

How does a godless cosmos make a heaven and an earth? How does she make crocodiles, crusaders, continents, and Milky Ways? How does a godless cosmos cough up insight and emotion? How does it burp forth you and me?

That becomes the quest of a lifetime for you. It’s the quest you will begin in 1956. It’s the mission that you will pursue for over half a century. It’s the question whose answer can change the way that hundreds of millions of others see. It’s the question that can help us utterly reperceive.

How does the cosmos create?

That’s not just any question, it’s THE question. It’s the God Problem.

Howard Bloom is the author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History (“mesmerizing” The Washington Post), Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century (“reassuring and sobering” The New Yorker), The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism (“Impressive, stimulating, and tremendously enjoyable.” James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic), and The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates (“Bloom’s argument will rock your world.” Barbara Ehrenreich). Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Recent Visiting Scholar—Graduate Psychology Department, New York University. Founder: International Paleopsychology Project. Founder, Space Development Steering Committee. Member Of Board Of Governors, National Space Society. Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society. Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project. Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab. Member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology. Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat Foundation. Advisory Board Member, The Buffalo Film Festival. Board Member, Humanity Plus; Board of Editors, The Journal of Space Philosophy.

ill def get this. his book the lucifer principal introduced me to memetics in a very profound well written way.

Doug_hairston

GOD is the way truth and the light……we go through seasons in life, just like the earth, trust in jesus christ and faith will always change your circumstances, give him praises and put this devil worship and the things of this world behind, read the bible and seek him and he will find you, grow up, GOD is waiting on you to submit to him, you can still have fun in life, and slip every now and then because we were born in sin, and we are forgiven just remember while sinning to still put god first in life, and you can still reach eternal life, not eternal doom for those of you who want to thrust saten who is only out to find, seek, and destroy your life………………..WAKE UP FOCKS

Andrew

> A God who slaughters is no God at all. Or if he is, he is a God who has to be opposed. He is a God whose cruelty cannot be allowed to continue. He is a God who must be stopped.

Let’s change that a bit. A universe that slaughters is no universe at all. Or if it is, it is a universe that has to be opposed. It is a universe whose cruelty cannot be allowed to continue. It is a universe that must be stopped.

Tiny dancer

at least the universe seems like it was created involuntarily by chance (theory). But the so called gods of major religions, proudly slaughter fully aware of their actions. We can live and die without gods but we cant without the universe.

Liam_McGonagle

Or what if a God that slaughters is merely not an ANTHROPOMORPHIC God at all?

For that matter, what if human identity itself is nothing more than an ephemeral and barely stable confluence of bacteria who are forged into a unity by an act of perception rather than design?

What if pattern and randomness both exist and DO NOT exist in any given phenom, dependant only on the arbitrary selection of perspective?

Calypso_1

Hahahaha
Nice

http://www.ContraControl.com/ Zenc

Anthropomorphic or not, I’m of the mind that if I ever meet a “God”, one of us is going to get a serious ass-whipping that day.

Liam_McGonagle

I meet with God from time to time, and I ask Her why He doesn’t make more of an effort to clarify Her position to some of Its more backward followers.

Then They remind me of the hopelessly ironic character of the endeavor–attempting to reduce a transcendant experience to a programmatic statement as an effort to placate an insignificant pack of imbeciles.

Then She asks me why I don’t remember asking It this question a million times before.

http://www.ContraControl.com/ Zenc

It can say all that with busted lips and a mouthful of broken teeth?

Hmm, I might need to sharpen up my pocket knife too…

Calypso_1

I saw this beauty & thought of you.

http://www.ContraControl.com/ Zenc

As much as I like my mass produced Cold Steel, SOG, Gerber, Benchmade, etc knives, nothing quite matches the quality and aesthetics of a one-of-a-kind blade from a master craftsman.

Calypso_1

Makes you want to clean your teeth don’t it.

Lucidaable

I like that idea Andrew – very much. Very empowering

http://profile.yahoo.com/FRJD66AT6LQ6CZZ46XJO43A4FM Artor

The universe has no intelligent agency behind it, no inherent morality, and therefore no cruelty. It just is. One of the consequences of an anthropomorphic God is that it does have intelligent agency, and therefore it’s actions must be viewed through the filter of morality. By all accounts, the Judeo-Xtian god would be a horrible monster. I can’t understand how people that believe in it can claim that it’s a good thing. I guess cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

Taan Maat

The universe has no intelligent agency behind it, no inherent morality, and therefore no cruelty. It just is,

hey neat opinion! lol that’s all it is though, nothing but an opinion.

emperorreagan

I guess pop-atheism is a popular book genre among people who make submissions to disinfo.

Edmithe

I have always believed in the intelligent design theory, and not in a loving god. I believe in the I.D. theory because I just don’t believe the scientific theory of how the earth began and how we came up from goo. We being the earth, trees, animals, fish, insects and people etc. got here somehow and not by chance. I do not believe in a so called loving god – there is so much pain in the world that should not happen with a so called “loving god”. Am I an atheist????

Linsang811

You don’t believe in the fairly well evidenced concepts that life began with self-replicating molecules which progressed into pseudo-life which became life and over hundreds of millions of years, evolved into us….. but you do believe some magical, unaccounted for being created…. ya know what, nevermind.

http://profile.yahoo.com/FRJD66AT6LQ6CZZ46XJO43A4FM Artor

Unless you think the intelligent designer was an alien species that uplifted humans, then no, you’re not an atheist. The designer in ID, even if not benevolent, still quacks like a god. Study some more science and educate yourself. ID is a position of ignorance.

Jandice332

”
Unless you think the intelligent designer was an alien species that uplifted humans”

That’s the best explanation IMHO. The evidence points that way also.

Lightthatburnsthesun

God may exist or may not, but really who cares… For what is for the afterlife is best left for the afterlife and the living for the living. I really dont know if there is a god or not. As i see it there are these new gods that we follow or slave under mostly becouse of fear. And there are these remenants of past civilisations and their gods who probobly are considered dead becouse no one considers them to be gods anymore. So if a civilisation dies so does its god with it. And if a god can die then this probably is a godless earth. No matter. If you really want to thank anyone for life and all beauty thank life and every little thing you see. And if you really want to put faith in anything put faith in your self! The people moast dear to you.
I see this existence more as total chaos for anything can happen and anything is possible. The only thing we can control is our selves. So put your mind on your self and grow as a person and a being for if there truly is a god outthere, then he must be in all of us.
I think that it is better to put this old way of thinking with gods and such and move on. Evolve, be respectful for the old ways that once were and seek new paths in life. The energy one spends wondering and thinking about if there is a god or not and the afterlife consenquences is better spent at other things like one self and ones evolution. No body really knows if there is a god or not, not science or the men i cloth. So instead be responsible, live life and put your thoughts on life instead matters of the after.

btw i did not read the article, i just like to talk what ever.. 😀 btw my english is ok?

rus Archer

this logic would lead you to destroy the human race
in which case, the place to start = with yourself

The only thing to get is money

The problem with god(s) is that it does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist. I don’t know why these “debates” still exist.

this obsession with GOD is a very Judaio/Christian/Islam culture thingy
the other extreme is China
a 5000 year old culture that has never had a supreme god
nor has it ever had a State Religion, except emperor “worship”
one of its most famous religious novels (Journey to the West)
spends a great deal of time mocking all religion & superstition

on the other hand
the Chinese have been astute enough to know there’s something
undefined, mysterious and trickster-like
Lao Tzu put it this way:
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

OG

I don’t worship anything maybe hot women when they are being nice. But i rather have an invisible god i can try to ignore than some despot leeching off me and forcing me to do things with their security zombies. I call it the void, using the term darkness is kinda racist . When you lose the desire to be devoid of all desire you might enjoy a peak experience.

http://buzzcoastin.posterous.com BuzzCoastin

I’ll toke to that.

Calypso_1

There’s something to be said for worshiping hot women when they’re being mean as well.
Preferably if leather is involved.

OG

no way im the aggressor. Guys wanting to be dominated wreaks of deep emotional disturbance in my opinion.

Bruteloop

Guys wanting to dominate reeks of something as well.

Calypso_1

Being a Dom is delightful ….but training a woman to be one…oh boy. Liberating the female beast is NOT a submissive act, it takes masterfully applied aggression. Worship, in the sense I spoke of is an adornment and passing on of your own aggressive prowess in the service of someone worthy to wield their own.

The ability to willfully enter and navigate deep, uncharted or dangerous elements of the psyche in no way implies a disturbed individual. On the contrary, such endeavors can lead to enhanced functioning, stability, consciousness and success in ‘daily life’.

Simiantongue

In the Neverending Story it’s called the nothing. For a small stipend Netflix will rent you that gospel too. Comes with a childlike empress and everything.

Beware the Gmork, seek the southern oracle. The best advice I can give ya.

SAMM

I have worked with and for Chinese people.
Their God is money.
No kidding.

Phillipede

People have been searching for evidence of one god or another for over 6 thousand years and are still coming up empty. In the face of no evidence, the negative assertion is obviously the logical stance. In my opinion, the burden of proof lies on the person making a positive assertion.

The same rules of logic apply to other mythical creatures, in that there is no evidence saying that they don’t exist, except for the complete lack of evidence that says they do exist. So by the religious’ own logic they should believe in things like unicorns and leprechauns.

Jandice332

ALIENS!

http://skadhitheraverner.wordpress.com/ Skadhi_the_Raverner

Or perhaps the irresolvability of the problem, just means it isn’t worth asking. Big questions are only big at the time because they can’t be answered, so why do people bother with them?

No one can prove or disprove God exists using the scientific method, nor can anyone prove or disprove the existence of multiverses – undemonstrable junk science put out by atheists because it *looks* rational – like Intelligent Design.

Garth

Can mold judge a plant? Can a plant judge an insect? Can an insect judge a man? Can man judge God? What the excerpt fails to mention about the story of Job is Job’s decision to demand answers from God for his travails. God then actually shows up and asks Job where he was when he created all things. Job is humbled at that point and his life of tortured contrasts serves as a lesson to anyone who might dare to ask God “What doest thou?” The story of Job serves humanity for all time as a lesson and an insight into the ways of heaven that will never be forgotten…but few actually learn it. Job was indeed rewarded for the rest of his life and his happiness was restored. It seems that God does play fair and likes happy endings. Just remember that the reality God created doesn’t torture you…men do. Man creates the pollutants that create birth defects. Militaristic men wage wholesale world wars. Dictators instigate pogroms and holocausts. Religious charlatans hand out the kool-aid and molest choirboys. Politicians lie, corporations rob, mob bosses murder and sell drugs to children, If there’s hell on earth, the fault lies with mankind’s twisting of God’s creation. Dare you fault God for not stopping it and allowing freewill to exist?
Beware the day that God has had enough of you.